I'm currently facing censure at work for reacting in almost exactly the same way as yer fella here, and apparently need 'training'.

The kicker is, I need to find the training myself, and report back to those who complained about me when I've 'actioned' this training. And if it doesn't meet their nebulous standards, I could face formal disciplinary action.

I wish I was joking about this, but I'm not. My missus said to me the other day: "does this mean we'll lose the house"? So while this is humorous, you can be really f*cked badly by it.

Ohhh yes, and I'm Mr Anderson frantically banging my head off the edge of table hoping for the end to come or at least unconsciousness until the "meeting" is over.

A couple of my team mates place bets with each other on how long before it will be before I pull The Face. The one that says " I want to repeatedly punch you until you understand, you **** wit". Apparently it does take long usually.

As an electronics / electrical engineer I'd say I was the Asian chap, what tends to happen is that I spend the bulk of the time explaining the laws and fundamentals of primary school physics to the marketing and sales genii ....

Oh and I'm not as diplomatic...

The best meetings are the ones where the client bring along their expert, normally another engineer and we spend most of the meeting looking at each other with increadulous looks on our faces and talking slowly to the sales and marketing children to who think that Ohms law is merely a guideline.....

As the expert the job in those meetings is to ask questions, make notes and make no comment that could be construed to be a promise. It's very hard to bite your tongue while the Salesman spouts crap and the pointless/project manager stare at you.

Sorry to hear about your situation codybrennan, sounds like you need to find something like a sales for technical people. If the salesman has been on the sales course then he will have a plan for the meeting (BS, BS, BS, BS) also ask that you have a pre meeting with your team to raise concerns and agree on a plan/agreement on how to handle stuff.

Last one that even resembled that I attended I instigated a mass walk out, they then cancelled the follow up ones others were due to attended and reviewed the whole point of the meetings we attended to the point they cancelled them altogether.

In my younger days I built financial models to do, amongst other things some fairly complex stuff on how to allocate money. I was forever getting questions that amounted to - can everyone get more than the average increase.

I then got promoted to the man in the suit - my brief for my expert was, lets agree beforehand that they will have no idea - agree in the meeting, then do the sensible thing outside - no-one ever really noticed.

- Follow up meeting. Me: " Now it's not exactly what we discussed, but the work coming out of the US (Japan, Cambridge etc) indicates really strongly that people respond very positively to red lines... in red... They relate to the simplicity, it encourages [the thing you think you want].Look at Megacorp and their blue line in blue strategy, 75% growth over the last two periods. As for perpendicularity - here's some ides, I've got alternating perpendicular - technically we call this a grid, but lets not confuse things (little laugh), or a radiant spiral - appeals to the more artistic types, but maybe two much for the general public -knowing nod to marketing person. Or simple parallel lines - direct, easy to relate to, 80s retro, goes well with red lines in red. Good we're all agreed then. The bill is in the post."

Our meetings aren't that productive. We all had a 3 hour skype call last month in which the only words used were "Oh person X has disconnected" "Hello, can you hear me?" "Sorry, I can't hear you" and variations thereof. But it turned out the purpose of the call was purely so we could say we'd had a call so that's all good.

There's also plenty of 'experts' - let's use IT as an example, who will advise that your project will require a new server to deliver successfully - and then ask you to specify the server, before screwing their face up and explaining DMZs and LANs and whatever else. I DON'T CARE.

You told me I need a server, so tell me which one I need, how much it costs and then go and buy it, install it and take some responsibility for it then performing as it should. Or maybe that's just me.

Ah that problem, it's mostly to avoid turning up on site and finding that nothing works with your set-up. The words you were looking for were not I DONT CARE it's let me find somebody to answer your important questions for you.

I miss the days when I was a whelp analyst - experts could just do a little backwards whistle through their teeth, say "it'll be tricky, we can do it, but it'll cost you" and clients would be so grateful...

I think my brother would empathise with Anderson. When he worked in reprographics an architect came in and asked for his drawing to be 'reduced by 300%'. He politely had to explain that 300% was three times larger, not any amount smaller. And a long conversation ensued where he had to try an extract exactly what he wanted

reduced by 30% - ie 70% of the original size? No.
30% of the original size? No.
reduced by a third? reduced to a third of the size? No
1/300th of the original size? No.

Eventually his boss joined in, siding with the customer "look, its simple, just reduce it by 300%"

Eventually he just scanned it and printed it out exactly half size handed it over and that, apparently, was exactly what was asked for.

I'm sufficiently short of tolerance for people like that that I no longer get invited to meetings of this sort. It's easier for everyone that way and prevents me from having to be a first aider on a regular basis.